India must act: Publishers sound alarm on AI's ‘theft' of news content
The development follows a sweeping move by major global players, including the Associated Press, The Atlantic, Sky News, Time, Buzzfeed, Conde Nast, and DMGT, to block AI bots from crawling their websites by default. The effort is being supported by Cloudflare, one of the world's largest internet infrastructure firms, which has announced a new system that gives publishers granular control over AI access to their sites.
Indian publishers say the problem of unauthorised AI scraping has reached alarming proportions with no legal safeguards, licensing systems, or enforcement mechanisms in place.
'The situation in India is becoming increasingly untenable,' said a spokesperson for the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA), a key industry body.
'While global players are waking up to the importance of permission and fair compensation, Indian news content continues to be freely exploited without dialogue or safeguards. We urge the Government of India to take immediate steps to take necessary measures against such unauthorised and rampant data scrapping,' the spokersperson said in a press statement.
According to Cloudflare, OpenAI's GPTBot alone accounted for nearly 30 per cent of all AI-related web scraping in May 2025, a sixfold increase from just a year earlier. Other major scrapers include Meta's External Agent and Anthropic's ClaudeBot.
Cloudflare's new approach gives publishers the option to allow or block AI crawlers and even tag them based on intent, whether the bot is scraping for model training, search indexing, or inference purposes. Crucially, the company is also testing a 'pay-per-crawl' model that could allow news outlets to charge AI firms directly for accessing their content.
'This is a game-changer for publishers,' said Roger Lynch, CEO of Conde Nast. 'When AI companies can no longer take anything they want for free, it opens the door to sustainable innovation built on permission and partnership.'
But in India, publishers have few tools at their disposal. Unlike in the US and UK, where AI companies now face increasing legal scrutiny and regulatory pushback, Indian media houses are still operating in a grey zone.
The DNPA and other digital publishers have now jointly called on the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) to urgently act on the following demands:
'India has the potential to be a global AI leader – but not by trampling on the rights of its own creators,' said a senior editor from a leading digital news platform. 'We must innovate responsibly, with laws that value original content and protect public trust.'
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